| In China,both College English Test Band 4/6(abbreviated as CET4/6 below)and Public English Tests System Band 3/4(abbreviated as PETS3/4 below)belong to large-scale tests that are widespread and influential,which have a crucial impact on college students.Reading comprehension,as one of main types of questions,always occupies the prominent position in English language tests.However,previous studies in China on text complexity of reading between these two large-scale tests are rare.As most of previous researches mainly focus on descriptive analysis of test difficulty and exam technique discussion.Therefore,the author hopes to enrich text analysis in reading tests through analyzing text complexity of reading comprehension between different levels of tests,and to find specific distinctions between different types of proficiency tests.From the perspective of text complexity,this study aims to conduct a contrast analysis on reading texts of CET4/6 and PETS3/4.Differing from previous researches,which only focus on the analyses of lexical level and syntactic level,this research extends its analysis to textual level.Based on the analytical framework of Principal Components Analysis(abbreviated as PCA)proposed by Graesser,McNamara and Kulikowich as well as the other significant indices in Coh-Metrix,the four types of tests are researched from two aspects.One is to compare the different grades of tests in the same type;the other is to contrast two types of tests within the groups of similar difficulty levels.Both of them are analyzed from three linguistic levels-lexical level,syntactic level and textual level.To weaken the negative influence of different reading tasks on this research,the author chose the latest materials of detailed reading in these four tests from 2010 to 2015,randomly selected 24 texts from each test as original analytical samples,which amount to 96 texts of detailed reading in total.With the assistance of a computational text-analyzer named Coh-Metrix as well as the analytical framework of PCA,all indices for measuring text complexity are collected for further analysis by SPSS.The results indicate that the differences between these proficiency tests in the same type are presented significantly in the levels of lexis,syntax and discourse,meanwhile,the text complexity of the higher level is more complicated than the lower one.Besides,among the groups of similar grades in these two types of tests,the distinctions of text complexity between PETS3 and CET4 are significant.Besides,CET4 is obviously complicated than PETS3 at all of three levels.In contrast,the statistics shows that CET4 is less complicated than PETS4,partly in lexical level and syntactic level.The results of these three levels are non-significant in the group CET6 versus PETS4,except for three lexical indices.However,if it concerns text length within limited time that relates to reading efficiency,the text complexity of CET6 is higher than PETS4.Apart from some limitations of the study itself,through this research,the author hopes to verify the validity of text complexity between different levels of proficiency tests.In addition,the study also explore the distinctions of text complexity between PETS3/4 and CET4/6,aiming to provide some guidance as well as referential information to test designers,English teachers and test candidates. |
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